Google has a price for you. Proton found it. The company analyzed over 54,000 demographic profiles using 2025 ad auction data to see what advertisers pay to reach different Americans. The average American generates about $1,605 a year in advertising value. The median is $760. The gap between those two numbers tells the story. A small number of high-value users pull the average up. The business runs on outliers.
The spread is stark. A 35- to 44-year-old man in Bozeman, Montana — no children, desktop user, making high-value corporate searches — is worth an estimated $17,929 per year. An 18- to 24-year-old father in Fort Smith, Arkansas — Android phone, low-value searches — is worth $31.05. That is a 577x difference between two people using the same free service. Device matters. A desktop user is worth 4.9 times more than the same person on Android. An iPhone user is worth 2.7 times more than Android. Having children costs you roughly 17% of your ad value. Advertiser value peaks between ages 35 and 44. By 65, average value drops to $511.
Where you live sets a floor on your price. Local service providers — lawyers, real estate agents, financial planners — bid against each other for local clicks. The more competitive the local market, the higher the floor price for everyone in it. The top markets are Edmond, Oklahoma and Bozeman, Montana, followed by Naperville, Illinois, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Durham, North Carolina. The least valuable markets are concentrated in the Rust Belt and Appalachia — Wheeling and Parkersburg in West Virginia, Toledo, Ohio, and Buffalo, New York — where lower median incomes and fewer competing advertisers mean less bidding pressure. Over a decade, the average American represents roughly $16,050 in ad value. The most monetized profiles approach $180,000. Most people would not hand a corporation that much money over a lifetime. But that is what the system collects.
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Google, while big, is only one internet advertiser - and all that collected advertising income actually comes from consumers of the goods and services being advertised, as a premium on the price of the products. One particular medical device I worked on cost $600 to make, and $14,400 to sell at a net price to the patient of $15,000 for the device and another $15,000 to the hospital for the implantation procedure. Yes, the company was operating at break-even, spending 24x what the physical device cost to make and deliver on nothing but sales and marketing - hoping that some day they could get those sales costs down... didn't happen during the 2 years I worked there.
(Score: 5, Funny) by DadaDoofy on Friday May 01, @11:11AM (4 children)
"An iPhone user is worth 2.7 times more than [an] Android [user]."
Correct.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01, @02:00PM (3 children)
Indeed, but consider that, in context, what we're talking about amounts to an 'effectiveness index' for advertisers here.
You do realise that this figure is a relative measure of gullibility? it is saying, in essence, that iPhone owners are 2.7 times more 'gullible' than Android users and therefor are more likely to fall for targetted advertising, which is why Google charges advertisers more for access to them.
or, did you mean to imply something else there by your 'Correct'?
(Score: 5, Touché) by Barenflimski on Friday May 01, @02:42PM (1 child)
Naw, Android users are poor.
(Score: 5, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 01, @07:12PM
Android users are worse than poor - plenty of poor people use iPhones - Android users are tight, stingy, cheap, miserly, sparing, careful, and worst of all: they think before they spend money. Some of them are even smarter than the average advertiser...
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Saturday May 02, @07:31AM
I think rather it's a measure of their relative likelihood of running adblockers.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Informative) by PiMuNu on Friday May 01, @11:19AM (5 children)
> Advertiser value peaks between ages 35 and 44
Anyone older than 44 grew up without the internet.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01, @11:52AM (3 children)
> Anyone older than 44 grew up without the internet.
What counts as "grew up"? When I was at uni, a friend in the CS department showed me the Arpanet connection they had. This was mid-1970s and I was ~20. Given some of the dumb things I did back then, I don't think I was grown up at 20...(grin).
I started using company hosted email (by modem) in the early 1980s.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 01, @12:32PM
I made it to grad school before I touched ARPAnet (Kermit transfer of a single file from a long hand written address, address communicated via snail mail.) I think that counts as "grew up".
I wasn't really having much life-influence from the internet until about 96-97. In 97 I used "the web" to find a hotel in the Swiss Alps before leaving Miami - only about 10% of the hotels in the region had any internet presence back then.
So, I'll say if you were under the age of... 8 after 1998, we might say you mostly "grew up" with the internet. That would be an age of 36 today. At 44, you were already 16 before it started booming, but I guess your entire adult/working life had it to some extent.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Friday May 01, @12:58PM (1 child)
There are always outliers on any scale, but here in Backwoods, Nowhere, there wasn't even dial up internet available until about 1995. ADSL became available around 2005. In flyover country, people over about 30 went a long way toward growing up without internet. Anyone over 44 who grew up with internet in their home was born into a wealthier family who could afford to pay for their own T1 or T2 telephone line. Life in the cities is always different - your local library may have had internet that you could access. And, remember too, that for much of America, connecting to an ISP was long distance. Every minute that you stayed connected, a few more cents were added to your monthly telephone bill. You had to be in some kind of a privileged position to make free use of any net in the 70s, less so in the 80s, and even into the 90s. Today, the internet is so ubiquitous, the average young American simply cannot imagine the world that us old people grew up in.
We're gonna be able to vacation in Gaza, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and maybe Minnesota soon. Incredible times.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Saturday May 02, @07:35AM
That long distance charge, during business hours, was around $20 per hour. That's why there were QWK packets, so you could grab your mail and run.
I lived long enough with no phone at all (9 years of my adult life) that to this day it is not my first thought (still inclined to just go wherever to talk to someone rather than call). Internet on the PC, tho... it's amazing how many times I think "I'll just look that up... oh crap" when the power is out.
Then again, I use the internet partially as an excuse not to call anyone.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday May 02, @10:20AM
Meh, we had Mrs. Muller at no.27, we didn't need any internet.
Although admittedly the verbally-transmitted cat memes needed a bit of imagination.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01, @11:45AM (10 children)
I wonder what we (collectively, SN users) are "worth" to Google? First guess is, "very little", since it seems like everyone here runs some sort of ad blocker and doesn't click on the ads that get through.
Personally, I might read ads that come back from a search, but rarely click. Early 70s, I already have most of the things I want, so I just don't buy that many discretionary items.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 01, @12:35PM (1 child)
I run multiple ad blockers, but I achieve nowhere near 100% blockage - particularly from Google. I consider it a sort of balance of effort vs value, what I run is relatively low effort and delivers a lot of value in reduced ad show.
What's shocking is when I get on some kid's phone (outside my PiHole DNS) and try to browse for anything - the content is absolutely buried under/behind the ads, it's worse than listening to broadcast radio.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Bentonite on Sunday May 03, @11:20AM
I run ublock origin and don't run JavaScript - I get no ads.
Multiple ad blockers tends to cause blocking conflicts and allows ads to slip through - configured ublock alone is the most effective malware denier - but the only 100% effective way to do so is to disable JavaScript.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Friday May 01, @01:04PM (3 children)
The same thought crossed my mind when I read the title. The most advertising I see these days, is on Youtube. Google screwed up uBlock Origin with the newest Chrome browsers - but it still works fine on Firefox. So, when I forget, and click a Youtube link in Chrome/Chromium/UngoogledChromium, I see those in-line ads. Elsewhere, away from Youtube - I probably see two or three ads a month. Truth be told, I don't even mind the self-hosted ads - little guys need to made a little coin too.
We're gonna be able to vacation in Gaza, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and maybe Minnesota soon. Incredible times.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 01, @01:11PM (1 child)
I wonder, though, if you're "virgin territory" aren't you worth more, since your attention span hasn't been depleted?
That may be a flaw in TFA's analysis, those high value desktop users with no kids may be hard to reach, so reaching them costs more because it happens less frequently?
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01, @01:31PM
> those high value desktop users
When I read that in the summary, my assumption was that these were users at work with a capital equipment or other budget? If you click on an advert and eventually your company purchases a $200K CNC machine, that ad was worth quite a lot (but there were probably actual sales people involved as well).
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday May 02, @07:42AM
Same thought. My value is approximately zero. Well, maybe two cents.
UBlock Lite on current Chrome (or Supermium, or Edge) works just fine to sterilize Youtube for human consumption.
Lately I discovered that it also kills ads on Roku-TV-by-browser, whatever the site is called.
In SeaMonkey (I don't use Firefox) I also run NoScript, and I have a good HOSTS file. (I haven't had to add or subtract a site from either in a couple years now, and very rarely for the past decade.)
Either browser family, I see ads seldom to never.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday May 01, @02:48PM (2 children)
I am not quite sure about my worthiness to anyone but in past three months, I got offered by Google a construction crane (yes, really big one, though very modular), European design military anti-drone vehicle with solid state MW radar (not cannon though, only a heavy machine gun), some second hand but still seaworthy yacht (almost new, docked in Italy) with complete crew and captain ready to serve and a set of 150 hand-crafted kitchen knives (not a typo, literally one hundred fifty). In the couple of past years that were for example business class aircraft or modular portable fortification kits. Industrial PLCs and robots long before they went pop.
Yes, I really clicked those ads, serious businesses. I do not count investment scammers.
Guess I really could build up a tiny empire and castle from all those. What a missed opportunity.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01, @03:13PM
> second hand but still seaworthy yacht (almost new, docked in Italy) with complete crew and captain ready to serve
I'd do a lot of research before thinking about something like this--what's the chance it belongs (or belonged) to some Russian oligarch who has been sanctioned...and the yacht is on a watch list to be confiscated?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 01, @05:09PM
> Yes, I really clicked those ads
You are feeding the beast... those are (hopefully) very specifically targeted ads of very high cost, and you are continuing to establish a profile as "someone interested in" such things, so you are high on their targeting list.
> I really could build up a tiny empire and castle from all those.
With sufficient cash. Of course if you have the cash and the genuine interest, you don't need to wait for random ads to appear.
> What a missed opportunity.
Yes, the cash required for those things certainly can be put to better use...
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday May 01, @05:05PM
I'm not sure but I think we would rank very poorly in ad value. Most people here are probably in the grumpy old men category. We are probably pushing the higher age brackets etc. Most seem to hate ads and new wiz things with a vengeance. We adblock everything. Somehow I just don't think they are lining up to sell us things ... In some regard we might have negative ad value, they would probably pay to avoid most of us like the plague if they only could.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Friday May 01, @02:07PM (2 children)
Why Bozeman is one question, but perhaps the other is why not any of the cities in the SF Bay Area, which have a lot of wealth and wealthy people? Or Boston? The only coastal city I see is Bellevue, WA. and generally the wealth in the USA is mostly along the coasts.
If I open a new Chrome tab on my phone and look at the articles it shows, there will always be one for "how long does $1M last in retirement?".
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01, @03:16PM
> ... "how long does $1M last in retirement?".
I'm never tempted by those. I know the answer and (at least in USA), it's not all that long...if your end of life includes a nursing home or other long term care.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 01, @07:18PM
Some old movie depicted a couple of rich brothers who lived out in the middle of nowhere - but travelling salesmen marked them as rich impulse spenders, selling them all kinds of absurd things right up to and including a huge luxury yacht - to float in a pond they had dug for it on their farm. Seems like the screenwriters were inspired by denizens of Bozeman.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Friday May 01, @03:06PM
This is great news. One more large corporation to think about as I look at the sky and shake my fists.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday May 01, @05:13PM (1 child)
Why? One would think if you have, small, children you are locked in. It's many MANY years of providing for offspring without their own money. They will for many years consume enormous amounts of consumer goods -- food, clothing, diapers, drugs, toys ... They will suck you dry cause they know at least most parents want to provide everything they can for their offspring. Forsaking themselves and their own needs, wants and desires.
Shouldn't there be ample room in the higher bracket to for "nostalgia". I guess old and young and children just drop from the oh so lucrative childless young idiot market that seems to spend like no tomorrow on crap.
The same market segments say all the idiots that make TV/Movies/Music seem to cater to. One would think there would be a lucrative market for the other groups. But there is this focus on the young hot money demographics ... They might have money to spend, but they also have options. So the market there is probably a lot more cutthroat and expensive. Perhaps it would be better to find another niche market and be the dominator there.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 01, @07:15PM
>Having children costs you roughly 17% of your ad value.
Having children reduces your impulse spending capacity, and your attention span. You are that much less likely to have "impulse spending authority" at work if you're pursuing a family instead of a fast track up the ladder. Ads for things not directly useful for your kids become less effective, and therefore less valuable to the advertisers.
How much? After decades of data collection, it appears that - on average - children consume about 1/6th of your free will.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jb on Saturday May 02, @08:24AM
Google's search engine is not a free service. Far from it. The price is allowing yourself to be spied on by the dodgiest company on the planet.